Interesting but one bit i disagree with: > I've always skewed away from visual programming and dialogue engines. While they are great for beginners, getting re

Interesting but one bit i disagree with: > I've always skewed away from visual programming and dialogue engines. While they are great for beginners, getting real work done is problematic. Having visual tools is certainly not just for beginners, i guarantee you that most AAA and many AA and even smaller projects use dedicated visual tools for things like dialogue. As an example see Obsidian's conversation editor described here [0] that they have used for several of their projects. For other examples see the dialog editor used in Witcher 2 (REDkit) or the editors used in Bethesda's games (the engine might be a bit clunky at times but the tools are largely visual, outside of quest-specific scripting of course). Witcher 2's tools also include visual quest and FSM ("steering") editors. These are all tools that are used to do real work. Personally i have worked professionally in game tools for many years and visual tools are always an improvement over something basic. It is usually programmers that seem to want to ignore them, but i'm 100% sure that is because they can do most of the stuff with pure text (though rarely at the same speed as a good visual tool would allow, even if they think otherwise - note that i'm not talking about scripting here, this is often better done via a scripting langauge) and they do not like working with GUIs and such (i am one of the apparently rare programmers who likes working with GUIs) so they come up with excuses why their way is better. Many things in games, including conversations (and perhaps high level quest flow, depending on the game), are better done with visual tools than text - especially if these tasks are to be done by non-programmers. [0] https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/175082312536/im-curious-as-to-what-the-conversation-editor https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/175082312536/im-curious-as-...